Rebecca Brown & Ryan Boudinot w/ Brekan Blakeslee & Matthew Stadler

Join writers Rebecca Brown and Ryan Boudinot for the Fellow Travelers Series Holiday Party celebrating the press and their new books, Obscure Destinies: a story, a memoir, a play, and an essay by Brown and Broken Utopia: a novel by Boudinot. They’ll be joined by fellow writer Brekan Blakeslee, and publisher and editor of the Fellow Travelers Series, Matthew Stadler.

Registration is not required, but helps us anticipate audience size. If you'd like to RSVP, please do so here!

Copies of Obscure Destinies and Broken Utopia, along with other Fellow Travelers books, will be available for purchase at the event.

About Obscure Destinies

Rebecca Brown's new prose collection, Obscure Destinies, is a compact tour de force of prose writing that takes a single theme and drives it through four genres—story, memoir, play script, and essay—showing Brown's astonishing range of skills, handling the most intimate and enduring subject matter: the encounter of the living with loved ones who are dying. It is her first new book in three years.

For more than forty years, Rebecca Brown has been writing novels, stories, and essays about how the living cope with the dying of people they love. In her newest book, Brown has gathered four distinct forms—a story, a memoir, a play, and an essay—to bear on four such encounters: a group of gay teens in 1970s Texas, responding to the death of a beloved, and closeted, teacher; old friends in 21st-century Seattle helping a loved one die of cancer; a pair of siblings teaching each other how to live in the wake of a parent’s death; and the lives portrayed in Willa Cather's story collection of the same title, Obscure Destinies.

"How do you approach grief, Rebecca Brown asks, in Obscure Destinies, where she offers four methods of responding to death—short story, memoir, play, essay. The form of each piece remains distinct, but the emotion expands through the shifts in voice and tone, character and address, from narrative fiction to episodic nonfiction, absurdist theater to a personal introduction at the end. With rare precision and understated candor, Brown creates an innovative quartet where the writing itself becomes a tender experiment in care."
—Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Terry Dactyl

"Rebecca Brown’s writing has always been attuned to our proximities to illness and grief. Here, radiantly across forms, she finds awe, humility, and beauty in what scares us most. Brown shows that remembering is enough, that the lives and deaths of people who many would not consider ‘important’ (how often does important mean exploiter, destroyer, accumulator—most of the time) are a plenitude."
—Nate Lippens, author of My Dead Book

"Rebecca Brown’s voice, her constant, light authority, the wide, watchful eyes of a great observer, the big heart —and the beauty and clarity of each sentence, of each piercing piece of this. Read Obscure Destinies only if books matter to you."
—Amy Bloom , author of Lucky Us, White Houses, and I'll Be Right Here

About Broken Utopia

Lee is one of the most celebrated American novelists of the 1980s, not to mention an obnoxious, womanizing jerk. His body of work just happens to have been created by artificial intelligence in the future and delivered to him by some guy named Max. Broken Utopia locates Lee and Max in a cosmos divided into three interdependent layers—the eternal Town, the User Platform, and the Substrate—all ruled by Vicarious, a company that converts human experiences into drugs. Residents of the Town enjoy lives on a loop of endless enrichment and wonder, as inhabitants of the Substrate eke out harrowing routines of addiction and delusion. Meanwhile, in the Substrate, a near future earth teeters at the edge of a mass extinction event that—for better or worse—is only temporary. Ryan Boudinot's first new novel since 2012's Blueprints of the Afterlife follows a cast of mystics, frauds, and profoundly incompetent cult leaders through Iceland, Seattle, black holes, and your own blown mind on a quest to reboot reality itself.

Rebecca Brown is the author of fifteen books (novels, short stories, memoirs, essays, prose poems) published in the US and abroad (UK, Japan, Germany, Holland, Norway, etc.). She lives in Seattle with her wife.

Ryan Boudinot is the author of five previous books, including the novel Blueprints of the Afterlife and the story collection The Octopus Rises. Boudinot conceived, launched, and led Seattle’s effort to get designated a UNESCO City of Literature. Self-funded, he established the project with the City of Seattle and the US State Department, and met with officials in Paris, Norwich, Edinburgh, Dublin, Reykjavik, and Chengdu to lay the groundwork for the city’s successful bid. As part of this campaign, he also edited the anthology Seattle City of Literature, published by Sasquatch Books in 2015.

Brekan Blakeslee grew up in the woods of Pennsylvania tending to an animal graveyard and now lives in Seattle, tending to broken dolls and old bones. Probably It Will Not be Okay is their first novel.

Matthew Stadler is a Seattle novelist and editor. In 2012 he started a literary imprint called the Fellow Travelers Series, where he publishes great new books by authors he admires. Fifteen-or-so titles, so far, including Spreadeagle by Kevin Killian, Probably It Will Not Be Okay by Brekan Blakeslee, My Dead Book by Nate Lippens, Obscure Destinies by Rebecca Brown, and Broken Utopia by Ryan Boudinot.

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